When Cloud Cameras Go Dark: Lessons From Today’s Eufy Outage

This morning I woke up to a familiar modern horror story. The Eufy app could not load live video from my cameras. The app just spun. The servers behind the scenes were having a bad day.
My setup survived because I stream my Eufy feeds locally over RTSP into Frigate. While many folks stared at a frozen app, I could still see my cameras on my home network.

Here is what happened, why it matters, and how to design your own system to avoid this kind of lockout.

What actually happened today

There was a clear spike of user reports about Eufy connectivity problems early today, January 3, 2026. One community post that tracks outages referenced a surge at around 06:43 in the UK. Reports described the app failing to open live feeds, HomeBase not reachable over the WAN, and errors like “unable to connect to HomeBase (-3).”

From public threads, issues appeared to start the previous evening for some users and continued into late morning. One user in the UK noted a brief return around 11:38 GMT before the service dropped again. Others across Europe said the app only worked on the local LAN or via the web portal, not from mobile networks. That points to problems with the cloud relay and remote P2P paths rather than the cameras themselves. Reddit

To recap the window using public reports:

• First reports started the evening of Friday, Jan 2 (UK time).
• Widespread trouble continued through Saturday morning, Jan 3, with intermittent recovery around late morning and further instability afterward. Reddit

Eufy’s official status pages are sparse, and there was no clear public post from the main Eufy account acknowledging today’s disruption at the time I looked. That lack of a clear status feed is part of the problem for users who rely on the vendor to communicate during outages. eufy Support+1

A few snapshots from social posts

Short quotes, trimmed for length:

“EUFY 2C cams all down… live stream… Down since yesterday p.m.” (UK/Cyprus) Reddit

“11:38am GMT and cameras are working again… and 3 minutes later they are not.” Reddit

“HomeBase3 unreachable from WAN, reachable from LAN. Please allow us to bypass your cloud.” Reddit

A separate outage tracker post also flagged Eufy as down for some users today, aligning with the timing above. DesignTAXI

These are exactly the kinds of symptoms you see when a vendor’s relay or authentication stack is misbehaving. Local traffic still flows, but the app depends on a cloud path for session setup, auth, or signaling.

Why “cloud only” hurts most when you need it most

Security cameras are safety tools. If you cannot view them during an incident, the value drops to zero.

Many camera brands talk about “local storage,” but practical use still depends on vendor servers for sign-in, push notifications, and remote viewing. Eufy’s own support docs describe behavior during power or internet loss, and community posts have long discussed how devices check in with the cloud even when recording locally. In other words, you often need the vendor’s infrastructure for the experience to work smoothly outside your LAN.

Relying on any single external service creates a single point of failure. When that service hiccups, you lose visibility and control at the exact moment you want both.

How my setup stayed online anyway

I run Eufy cameras with RTSP streaming enabled and ingest them into Frigate on my home server. Frigate handles detection and recording locally. When Eufy’s app choked, my Home Assistant dashboard still showed each camera.
No cloud relay. No vendor login. Just local IP streams.

There are plenty of ways to do this. The exact recipe can vary by camera model, but here are the core ideas that make a system resilient:

1. Prefer local transport for the video path
   RTSP, ONVIF, or a vendor-agnostic NVR feed keeps your primary stream inside your network. Even if the vendor app is down, your recorder and dashboards continue to work.
2. Use a local NVR or Frigate
   Frigate, Blue Iris, or a dedicated NVR lets you record and review footage without logging in to a third-party service.
3. Expose remote access carefully
   For remote viewing, avoid blind port forwarding. Use a secure VPN like WireGuard, Tailscale, or a reverse proxy with SSO. If the vendor relay fails, your private tunnel is still yours to control.
4. Design for graceful degradation
   If push notifications depend on the cloud, supplement them. For example, Frigate can send alerts via your own MQTT and Home Assistant stack. If vendor push goes quiet, your local alerts still fire.
5. Document a “cloud free” path
   Make sure everyone in the house knows how to open the local dashboard. During an outage, this avoids panic and needless rebooting.

“But I chose Eufy for local storage”

This is common, and it is not wrong. Eufy cameras can store video locally and even support NAS or HomeBase storage on some models. The problem is that the app experience and remote viewing still depend on servers you do not control. Community discussions and support content reinforce that dependency during network events. Today’s outage highlights the difference between local storage and local operation.

If true independence is your goal, verify three things before you buy:

• The camera exposes an open, local stream protocol that you can pull without the vendor app.
• Recording and detection run on a device you control.
• Remote access uses your VPN or proxy, not a vendor relay.

Practical checklist to future-proof your setup

• Turn on RTSP on each camera if supported, and test the feed with VLC.
• Stand up Frigate or an NVR and let it handle motion, zones, and recording.
• Add a UPS for your switch, access point, and NVR so local video survives brief power blips.
• Set up a VPN for remote access that does not depend on the vendor.
• Keep the vendor app, but treat it as a convenience, not the backbone.
• Audit your alert paths and add a local one so you get notifications even when cloud push fails.

Final thoughts

Today’s Eufy outage ran through the night for some users and into late morning with on-off recovery. If your only window into your cameras is a cloud login, you had a rough day. If you build a local path first and treat the cloud as optional, you keep control of your own security system when it matters most.